Federal Reserve: Wells Fargo is 28% less risky than JPMorgan Chase

Here’s a $40 billion question: Is Wells Fargo really that much less risky than JPMorgan Chase?

Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve released its rules on how much extra capital big banks had to hold because they are big and obviously dangerous to the broader economy if anything big ever went wrong. Just how dangerous, though, in the Fed’s opinion, depended on the bank. Wells Fargo WFC, for instance, will only have to hold 2% of its assets, adjusted for risk, in additional capital because of its big badness, the least of any of the big banks. JPMorgan JPM, on the other hand, will have to hold 4.5% of risk-adjusted assets of additional capital, because presumably of its even bigger and badder-ness.

The higher capital requirement translates to $42.4 billion. That’s how much extra capital JPMorgan will have to hold compared to Wells Fargo. Here’s another way to look at it: When you tack on the new extra big bank capital requirement, which the Fed calls a “surcharge,” Wells Fargo will be required to hold capital equal to 9% of its assets. JPMorgan will be required to hold 11.5%. That means JPMorgan, as least in the minds of the Federal Reserve, is 28% more risky than Wells Fargo.

That wasn’t the case in the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Both companies faired relatively well compared to other banks, which isn’t saying much. Neither lost money. But Wells Fargo’s earnings dropped 71% in 2009. That was more than JPMorgan’s 68% slide. JPMorgan is bigger, though, so it’s earnings did drop more – $10 billion vs. $6 billion for Wells Fargo. JPMorgan’s loan losses were also bigger than Wells Fargo, but it started with a loan losses reserve that was twice as big. The result was that JPMorgan had to put aside an additional $25 billion to cover its bad loans in 2009 and 2010, or just 19% more than Wells Fargo’s $21 billion.

In the most recent stress test, the Federal Reserve estimated that JPMorgan would have nearly $50 billion in loan losses in a severe economic downturn. That’s a lot. But it is only 2% more than the $49 billion that the Fed thinks Wells Fargo would have. Of course, the Fed also estimates that JPMorgan would have an additional $29.8 billion in trading losses, compared to just $15.5 billion for Wells Fargo. The Fed has traditionally been harsh on banks with Wall Street operations. Even added together, though, JPMorgan’s projected losses are only 24% higher than Wells Fargo’s, which is under our 28% bar, though only slightly.

Wells Fargo has long cultivated the image of being less complicated and therefore less risky. It doesn’t have a very large Wall Street investment banking or trading business. The Fed, again, has determined that’s a good thing. But two years ago, though, The Atlantic did a deep dive into Wells Fargo’s finances and found them no less hard to decipher and full of risks than the other large banks. And Wells Fargo’s loan book is significantly larger than JPMorgan’s – $860 billion to $766 billion, respectively.

JPMorgan, on the other hand, has argued it has safety in the fact that it has a diverse set of businesses. It’s trading business could help offset losses in its lending book. JPMorgan’s London Whale portfolio, for instance, was positioned to cover the bank’s lending losses if the world blew up. It didn’t, and that’s in part why the bank ended up with $6 billion in unnecessary losses. But had the world actually blown up history might have been seen JPMorgan’s chief investment office as a buffer, rather than another huge risk.

In part, some of that is because of the Fed. The lower capital requirement is likely to make Wells Fargo’s lending operations more profitable then JPMorgan’s. (Higher profits is why the banks wanted to hold so little capital in the run up to the financial crisis.) So it makes sense that investors would value the shares of Wells Fargo’s higher than JPMorgan’s. But if Wells Fargo isn’t much safer than JPMorgan as the Fed thinks, regulators could be driving investors to the wrong bank.

Moody’s is finally admitting it made an error in calculating the ratings of hundreds of subprime, alt-a and other mortgage bonds that were issued in the run up to the financial crisis. The announcement was made in a routine ratings update earlier this week, one of many that the credit agency issues daily, and went unnoticed. The mistake has not been previously reported.

Moody’s MCO says it recently discovered the error even though it had to do with bonds that were rated as early as 2001. It said it periodically reviews its ratings, but had missed the error until recently. Many of the bonds, like other subprime mortgage issues of the same vintage, have suffered much larger losses than expected. Investors and observers have long suspected and claimed that Moody’s, and rival S&P, made errors in the way it rated mortgage bonds, particularly subprime, during the housing bubble.

But the ultimate irony is this: Moody’s said correcting the miscalculation now would likely put only “limit downward pressure” on the current ratings of the bonds. The reason, in part: Most of the bonds affected by the error have long been downgraded. Nearly half are now rated the equivalent of CCC+ or lower, which is deep into junk territory. Most were originally rated AAA. In fact, Moody’s said fixing the long ago miscalculation might actually qualify some of the bonds for an upgrade.

“It’s a bit like the current Pope going to Spain and saying the Inquisition was a mistake,” says Sylvain Raynes, a mortgage bond expert at R&R Consulting.

It appears to be the first time Moody’s has admitted an error connected to the ratings of subprime mortgage bonds, and other toxic debts that contributed to the financial crisis. None of the experts Fortune contacted for this story could remember a similar admission. And a search of past articles and press releases did not turn up anything. A spokesperson for Moody’s said the company has acknowledged mistakes before, but could not produce a prior example.

“I think it’s important that they acknowledge the inaccuracies in the process used to rate these bonds, albeit seven years too late,” says Darren Robbins, a partner at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd. The law firm sued S&P and Moody’s on behalf of investors who said they were misled by S&P and Moody’s ratings. The case was settled two years ago.

It’s unclear how much, if any, and for how long Moody’s miscalculation inflated the ratings of the bonds. Moody’s only offered a brief explanation of the mistake in its ratings update. The agency said it used the actual interest payment made by borrowers to calculate the so-called weighted average coupon, or interest that was to be collected and passed along to bond holders. Moody’s now says it should have used promised payments, not actual payments, to figure out how much bond holders would be paid.

But a number of mortgage bonds experts said this seem backward. Using actual payments would likely have resulted in a lower rating for the bonds, not higher, as Moody’s suggests. Credit agencies have been criticized in the past for basing their ratings on models, and not actual payments.

“I think it’s interesting because it appears that something else may be happening here, the story seems to be incomplete,” says Gene Phillips, a mortgage bond expert who runs PF2 Securities Evaluations.

A spokesman for Moody’s says the mistake, had it been caught, likely wouldn’t have impacted the initial ratings of the bonds. The spokesman said Moody’s had used the actual payments to initially calculate what was owed on the mortgages, and what bond holders could expect, and not the stated interest rates on the loans. When the monthly payments rose to match the interest actually owed, Moody’s counted the additional payments against the principal, and wrote down what was still owed on the bonds. Overtime, the divergence grew between how much principal Moody’s believed borrowers had paid down on the loans, and the higher amount that was actually still outstanding. The spokesman said going back and recalculating what was actually interest and what was principal payments will increase the amount that is still owed on the loans, which is why some of the bonds could get downgraded after the correction.

But the explanation raises the question of why the error wasn’t caught earlier. Trustee banks typically report the breakdown of interest and principal payments that are made on mortgage bond loan pools, and what is still owed, monthly. The Moody’s spokesman said the ratings agency’s miscalculation did not affected those trustee reports, and that those were believed to be correct. If so, it’s unclear why it took Moody’s more than seven years to realize that its data differed from what was in those reports.

The Moody’s spokesman characterized the miscalculation as “slight.” Moody’s says it affected the ratings of 263 slices, so-called tranches, of 145 deals. The bonds have a total value of $6.8 billion. The Moody’s spokesman said that was a small portion of the 5,400 mortgage bonds currently rated by the company. The spokesman said the bonds that were affected likely shared a similar structure, that was different than typical mortgage bonds, but didn’t elaborate on what that difference was. He said Moody’s has examined a larger group of mortgage bonds and found no similar mistakes.

One of the bond deals is MortgageIT Loan Pass-Though 2006-1, a group of loans originated in 2006 by lender MortgageIT, which was later acquired by Deutsche Bank. In 2011, the government sued Deutsche Bank for $1 billion, accusing MortgageIT of “reckless lending practices.” Deutsche Bank eventually paid $202 million to settle the suit. A portion of the MortgageIT 2006-1 bond ended up in the hands of Fannie Mae. The bond was named in a suit by the government against Royal Bank of Scotland, which underwrote the deal. The suit claimed Fannie had been mislead about the quality of the bond.

Whether from a miscalculation or just a misjudgment it’s clear now that MortgageIT 2006-1 initially got a much higher rating from Moody’s than it deserved. The slice of the bond that was affected by the miscalculation originally got Moody’s highest rating, Aaa, which is the equivalent of a AAA. Moody’s now rates the same slice Caa3, which the equivalent of a CCC-, which is the firm’s fourth lowest.

Apple’s job just got a lot harder

Does the sharp drop in Apple stock make the iPhone maker a screaming buy? That’s what Wall Street analysts and market strategists are mainly claiming after its shares tumbled around 5% by mid-morning on Wednesday, erasing $38 billion in market value. Apple’s fans ardently believe that the tech colossus will keep making magic for years to come. Hence, these episodic sell-offs amount to nothing more than buying opportunities. And so far, they’ve been right.

This time, it was slightly disappointing sales of the new iPhone, and a forecast of fiscal 2015 revenues that fell below consensus estimates, that riled investors. Still, Apple bulls cited plenty of good numbers to bolster their case, including $10.7 billion in earnings for the June quarter, a 38% jump from over the comparable three months in 2014.

To be sure, nothing about this quarter indicates that Apple’s sorcerous performance is waning. Here’s the concern for long-term investors: Starting with earnings at extremely high levels — both versus its own history and compared to any company its size — Apple AAPL must deliver constantly rising profits far into the future. That will require both a continuation of strong revenue growth and gigantic operating margins. This isn’t impossible. But a close, sober look at the numbers shows just how far Apple must climb, from already lofty heights, to deliver good, but hardly spectacular, Apple-worthy, gains.

Let’s assume that investors want 10% yearly returns on their Apple shares — let’s face it, Apple is a relatively risky investment, as shown by today’s action. So how high must earnings rise over the next six years to deliver that 10%? On Tuesday, the day before the selloff, Apple boasted a market cap of $753 billion. That was 14.8 times its trailing 12 months of profits of $50.8 billion. A PE ratio of around 15 may sound cheap, but it still requires significant profit increases to deliver our 10% target.

The necessary numbers flow from two sources: cash returned to investors via dividends and buybacks, and capital gains. We’ll assume for now that Apple’s PE ratio remains constant, since once again, its multiple already foresees good profit growth from already staggering levels. In the past 12 months, Apple paid $11 billion in dividends. Its buybacks, less the value of shares issued to employees, are running at $26 billion a year. That’s a total of $37 billion. So on that $753 billion market cap, it’s been yielding, measured by cash returned to investors, around 5% annually.

To get to our 10% target, the share price must rise 5% a year. At a constant multiple, profits must wax at the same 5% to lift the stock by a like percentage. So by 2021, Apple would need to post net profits of $68 billion. That’s twice what the second biggest earner in the Fortune 500 (Apple was first), Exxon Mobil XOM, made in 2014. Its three times the profits of numbers three and four, Wells Fargo WFC and Microsoft MSFT. Profits approaching $70 billion would propel Apple to a $1 trillion dollar valuation, likely making it first on the planet to reach that milestone.

Of course, the 5% drop early Wednesday lowered the bar a bit. Apple would need to raise earnings a little over 4.8%, instead of 5%, to deliver 10% annual returns. But by 2021, Apple would still fall short without reaching $950 billion in market value, and posting annual profit increases of $3.4 billion a year, and rising, pretty much forever.

Apple enthusiasts will doubtless say that 5% profit growth will be a breeze. But just look at the size of these numbers. It will require bigger and bigger groundbreaking, wildly popular blockbusters to grow into them. Only an Apple could do it — if indeed it’s really doable.

How Wall Street makes its money now, in one chart

Five years after the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (aka. Dodd-Frank) was passed, Wall Street has survived, and it’s thriving again, though not quite as much as it used to.

One example: investment banking fees collected on U.S. deals in the first half of this year totaled $19.5 billion. That’s the second highest amount of fees that Wall Street firms have ever collected in any six-month period. And it’s only 3% lower than the $20.1 billion in fee investment banks collected in the first half of 2007, which was the most ever. And the breakdown of fees doesn’t look all that different from a decade ago (see chart above).

That just one sign the landmark banking reform bill that was passed in the wake of the financial crisis has not changed the business of Wall Street as much as some hoped. Trading, for instance, still makes up a large portion of money that is brought in by the big banks. Nearly five years ago, Fortune computed the percentage of revenue each of the big banks got from trading. The numbers were for 2009, the year before Dodd-Frank. I updated the numbers to see how Dodd-Frank had reshaped Wall Street in its first half decade, at least when it came to trading. The answer: Not much.

JPMorgan Chase JPM , for instance, generated 26% of its total revenue from trading activities in the first half of 2015. That‘s up from 20% in 2009. Bank of America also gets more of its revenue from trading than before Dodd-Frank, though not much more, 18% vs. 17%.

Goldman Sachs & Co. GS was always the Wall Street bank that got the most of its revenue from trading. And there, trading activities do appear to a smaller portion of how Goldman makes its money, but it’s still a lot of what the bank does. In the first half of this year, Goldman made 58% of its revenue from trading activities, down from around 75% in 2009. Morgan Stanley MS, too, which has recently got a reputation for eschewing Wall Street’s riskier businesses, got 36% of its revenue from its trading desk in the first half of 2015. That bank reported better-than-expected earnings on Monday, in part because revenue from trading operations was higher than expected.

And the big banks still devote a good portion of their assets to their trading businesses. At JPMorgan, for instance, the bank has $724 billion in trading assets, which includes its large derivatives book. That’s only down slightly from the $741 billion it had in its trading business in 2009. But JPMorgan’s overall assets have grown to $2.45 trillion from $2 trillion. So trading assets have shrunk to just over a quarter of the total. At Bank of America BAC , trading assets are also down only slightly, to $240 billion from $263 billion in 2009.

Overall, though, trading revenue is down. The nation’s six biggest banks, which also includes Citigroup Inc. C and Wells Fargo & Co. C , generated $50.5 billion in trading revenue in the first half of 2015. That’s down 20% from five years ago.

Also, it’s not clear what this says about risk. Wall Street’s biggest have had to ditch, at least formally, their so-called proprietary trading operations, which is when the banks are directly trading their own money, like a hedge fund would. Instead, the banks now appear to make most of their money completing client transactions. But banks can still lose money facilitating client trades. Earlier this year, for instance, Citigroup lost money when the Swiss Franc suddenly rose in value. A lot of money can still be lost in trading low-volatility assets if the volumes are big enough.

Dodd-Frank has reshaped the banks in other meaningful ways. Perhaps the biggest is that all of the banks are required to hold more capital to protect against losses than they used to. And that’s good news. Because their trading operations could still lose them a lot of money.

Goldman Sachs bankers are showing Jeb Bush the money

Goldman Sachs bankers want Jeb Bush to make it all the way to the White House, and they’re opening up their check books to make it happen.

All told, more than 50 Goldman Sachs executives and employees added $144,000 to Bush’s coffers in the second quarter, making Goldman Sachs GS the top company for donations given to the Republican’s campaign. Many of those donors sent in the maximum allowed $2,700 sum, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by Bloomberg.

Goldman Sachs employees were more keen on Bush, generally steering away from his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who received only $60,000 from Goldman workers. However, other banks on Wall Street seem to prefer Clinton. She received more money from donors at J.P.Morgan Chase JPM and Morgan Stanley MS.

JPMorgan Chase’s earnings beat expectations, as lending jumps

JPMorgan Chase’s earnings were better than expected in the second quarter, rising 5% from a year ago. Analysts had expected a slight drop. But the nation’s largest bank only got there by taking out its knife.

What you need to know: Net income for JPMorgan Chase JPM rose 5% to to $6.3 billion for the second quarter. That translated to earnings per share of $1.54. Analysts had been expecting $1.44. The bank earned $1.46 per share in the same quarter a year ago. Earnings rose despite the fact that JPMorgan’s revenue dropped just over $800 million in the quarter. Instead, the bottom line boost at JPMorgan, which has been paring back in investment banking and elsewhere, came from cost cutting. Expenses dropped by nearly $1 billion from the same quarter a year ago. In a statement, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said it was a good quarter, and that the bank had showed that it can meet its cost cutting targets.

The big number: As usual one of the biggest drivers of earnings for JPMorgan was its bond and fixed income markets division, despite rules to stem Wall Street trading. Most of the division’s revenue comes from executing client transactions. Last quarter, JPMorgan has surprisingly good numbers in that area. This quarter JPMorgan’s bond trading division was a disappointment. Revenue fell 10%. Analysts had been expecting a slight dip. JPMorgan said the drop was driven by weakness in its “credit and securitized products” and “currencies and emerging markets.” Stock trading revenue was up 27%, likely driven in part by the swings in the Chinese stock market. But stock trading overall is much smaller than the bank’s fixed income. As a result, JPMorgan’s revenue from its markets and investor services division fell 7%.

What you may have missed: In a good sign for JPMorgan and the economy as a whole, the bank made a whole lot more loans than it did a year ago. Lending rose nearly $45 billion from a year ago, up 6%. The bank said its core loan portfolio, which excludes areas of lending the bank is looking to exit, rose nearly $75 billion, or 12% from a year ago. Consumer lending, excluding credit cards (which were flat), was up 10%.

But there were some bad signs from JPMorgan’s lending division as well. The bank upped its reserves for bad commercial loans by $252 million, citing likely defaults from energy companies. The real estate market has picked up lately, but that wasn’t enough to offset a drop off in refinancing activity, which has slowed as interest rates have started to creep up. JPMorgan’s mortgage banking income dropped by 20%. On the whole though, investors seemed to seen good news in JPMorgan’s second quarter earnings, though they were far from joyous. Muddling along is the new reality for Wall Street. JPMorgan’s shares were up slightly less than 1% in pre-market trading to nearly $69.

Robots may write Wall Street analyst notes one day

Wall Street analyst notes may one day be written by robots — that’s if companies that make the artificial intelligence programs have anything to do with it.

One startup, Narrative Science, creates news articles generated by a computer program. The company has its sights set on financial services, too, The Wall Street Journalreports.

It’ll be a win for banks. They’re trying to boost efficiency and cut costs, and as the artificial technology becomes more advanced it can potentially take on more complex tasks, the report said.

The way Narrative Sciences’ program works goes like this: It sifts through information, such as regulatory filings, databases, and internal documents. Next, it uses an algorithm to put together the information in summaries or articles.

“It’s a very hot debate about whether the financial analyst community is going to be decimated by algorithms,” Celent Senior Analyst William Trout told the Journal. “Disruption, when it happens, happens very fast.”

“Analysts are overwhelmed with the work they typically have to do,” said Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel. Robots and automation “frees them up to do higher-value work.”

Wall Street isn’t the only place where robots may become more involved. Other jobs, such as cashiers and drivers, are seeing more automation, too.

Watch Stephen Colbert rip apart the NYSE outage in ‘Apocalypse Dow’

It all started with China’s plummeting stock market, then came United Airlines’ computer failure, followed by a technical glitch that brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt for almost four hours Wednesday. That’s prime content for the late-night hosts — even the ones who don’t have an actual show right now.

Buried in his “office bunker,” incoming Late Show host Stephen Colbert took to YouTube with an epic rant on the day’s frenzy, proclaiming the end of times.

“As you know today’s been a festival of dread and an all-you-can-eat hysteria buffet our worship of technology has midwived our doom, grounded flights, plummeting stock markets, a totally unusable redesign of Seamless,” Colbert said over static fuzz.

Colbert cried for the disenfranchised Wall Street bankers: “Do you understand for four hours that America’s bankers had no idea how rich they were?”

Wall Street was improperly pushing the door-open button for the next generation of Asia’s rich and powerful.

That’s one of the claims made by John LeFevre, author of the notorious Wall Street-themed Twitter account GSElevator and a soon-to-be published book, Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals.

In the book, LeFevre says that Citigroup and other Wall Street firms in the mid-2000s shifted their hiring practices in Asia, increasingly filling junior ranks with children of wealthy and powerful business leaders and government officials. LeFevre says many of the hires were “dumb and undeserving,” but came with the “implicit expectation” that it would win business for the banks from the recruits’ influential families.

“We all understand and expect that Chelsea Clinton can walk into a job at McKinsey or at Marc Lasry’s hedge fund. But in Asia, it has increasingly become the rule and not the exception,” LeFevre writes in the book, which is being published by Grove Atlantic and comes out in mid-July.

The allegation that the banks handed out jobs to Asia’s young elite as bribes to win business from China’s state-run entities is not new. Regulators have been looking into the issue for more than two years. The initial investigation appeared to be focused on JPMorgan Chase, but it has since extended to all the banks, including Citi and Goldman. Some JPMorgan executives linked to the hiring probes have left the bank. Yet there have been few first-person accounts of the hiring practices, and no cases have been brought.

LeFevre points the finger at Goldman Sachs and others, but he only offers direct evidence of the hiring practices at Citi, which is one of the oddities with the book, and with LeFevre. Even though he became known for @GSElevator, which led to the book deal, LeFevre never worked at Goldman Sachs. That fact, when it came out, nearly squashed the book deal, and he was dropped by his initial publisher after that came out. He worked at Citigroup from 2001 to 2008, before joining a smaller investment firm. But I guess LeFevre, who modeled the Twitter account on a similar one about magazine company Conde Nast, thought @CitiElevator wouldn’t draw many followers.

LeFevre says when he first got to Hong Kong in 2004, the hiring protocols at Citi were about the same as they were in New York. But he says by mid-2006, many of the new analysts in his office had come from a pool of resumes sent in by people “looking for favors.” Both Citi and Goldman declined to comment for this article.

In another part of the book, LeFevre explains how he and other bankers would regularly share non-public information about upcoming deals with hedge funds. LeFevre ran a bond syndicate desk in Hong Kong. The claim echoes a central point in another recently published Wall Street book, Why I quit Goldman Sachs, by Greg Smith. But unlike Smith, LeFevre shrugs off this practice—which he was a part of—that borders on insider trading as part of doing business. LeFevre also accuses the the Wall Street firms of essentially engaging in price-fixing, promising not to undercut each other on deals. LeFevre says he attended at least one secret price fixing meeting, but he says the agreement never really held.

That’s the best of the dirt LeFevre appears to have on Wall Street, aside from pointing out the obvious fact that the financial services industry has plenty of drug-addled jerks. Unlike Smith’s indictment of Wall Street as a place that regularly takes advantage of its clients, LeFevre seems much more interested in explaining just how good of a time he had as an investment banker. One of the chapters of Straight to Hell is titled, “Because they were muppets.”

The book reads as one twenty-something’s long night out. There are relatively few pages that don’t contain the words “hooker” or “cocaine.” Many pages have both. Thirty years after we learned of the misdeeds of the Masters of the Universe, much of the shock factor is gone. As a Twitter account, @GSelevator had some freshness and originality: It gave us a glimpse into Wall Street’s secret seething disdain for the rest of us at a time when financiers knew they had to be outwardly apologetic. It seemed to be the voice of Wall Street that Wall Street didn’t want to you to hear.

LeFevre in book form comes off as someone desperate to get attention who you can’t shut up. Like any elevator conversation that continues when the person exits on your floor, what LeFevre has to say becomes less interesting the longer it goes on. Even the tweets LeFevre includes in the book don’t seem as witty as they did on social media. Elevator missives translate well for Twitter because, like elevator conversations, tweets quickly vanish. I found myself wishing, unsuccessfully, that LeFevre’s book would do the same.

Twitter’s Dick Costolo: Wall Street ‘accelerates short-term thinking’

Twitter TWTR going public proved to be a tougher task than former CEO Dick Costolo initially expected.

The exec, who finished his post atop the popular social media service on Tuesday, said in an interview with The Guardian that the pressures of meeting Wall Street expectations were severe.

“When we took the company public, I had an expectation that the market would evaluate us based on our financial metrics first and foremost,” he told the publication. “I probably would frame the way we were thinking about the future of the company differently, understanding how we were in retrospect evaluated.”

Costolo added: “You always want to keep focused on the long-term vision, yet when you go public you’re on a 90-day cadence and there’s a very public voting machine of the stock price that accelerates that short-term thinking.”

There’s an ongoing search to find the next CEO of Twitter; co-founder Jack Dorsey will lead the company in the interim. Costolo stepped down from the top spot unexpectedly earlier this year.

Costolo spoke with Fortune’s Christopher Tkacyzk in April to about his thoughts on leadership and free speech in the workplace.